Wii Homebrew
Today I found out about the Wii homebrew scene, in particular the Homebrew channel. This adds a channel to the home screen where other homebrew applications can be easily loaded. The channel is installed by taking advantage of a bug in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the WiiBrew wiki explains it better than I ever could:
The Twilight Hack works by employing a lengthly character name for the horse in the game (’Epona’) in order to facilitate a stack smash. This gets triggered when talking to the man next to you when you start the save game as he loads the name to use it in his dialog or upon attempting to enter the next zone, before the man talks to you and reminds you to go the other way to get the horse.
So far I have tried two homebrew applications, MPlayer and Quake.
The MPlayer application is a native audio/video media player capable of playing a wide variety of formats including DivX/Xvid, which is what appealed to me the most. Files are loaded from an SD card and so far playback has been flawless!
Other than Linux, Quake seems to be the benchmark in homebrew development and has been ported to almost every platform thinkable. I wanted to give it a try and see how it fared with the Wii controls. The Wiimote and Nunchuck combination work brilliantly and I got used to the controls after just a few minutes. I only hope eventually there will be multiplayer support, be it split-screen or online play.
